ZTV

Zone of theoretical visibility

GPU requirements

Users of VU.CITY Desktop require an NVIDIA GPU that uses the Maxwell architecture (i.e. GeForce 900) or later. If your GPU does not meet this minimum requirement, you will be able to view existing ZTV studies, however you will be unable to generate one yourself.

If your GPU is not supported, you can instead generate the study using VU.CITY Cloud, then save it into a project and load that project into VU.CITY Desktop.

Accuracy

The ZTV tool uses line-of-sight calculations from the centre of every polygon on your model to determine where it is likely visible from. This means your model must:

• be a standalone model (multiple buildings / clusters are not supported), and
• have facades split by floor.

Multi-storey massing models built using the Create tool meet these requirements by default, so should produce an accurate calculation. In order to get an accurate calculation from an imported FBX/OBJ model, facades can be made up of triangles or quadrilaterals (tris or quads), however they must be split by floor. The following example is of a massing model with 4 floors:

Long polygon faces that stretch up the height of the building / are multiple floors tall will reduce the accuracy of your ZTV calculation.